TheMaker

Jesus murdered people? That's news to me.

For a guy who was "without sin," Jesus says and does a lot of deplorable things in the Bible, either directly or through various proxies who carry out certain deeds for him. He had his disciples steal corn (on the Sabbath, no less), he personally stole an ass, he drove a herd of pigs insane (causing them to throw themselves off a cliff), and so on. Christ's bigotry is on stark display in Matthew, where he is shown to refuse a Canaanite woman an exorcism (spoooooky magic!) due to the fact that she is a non-Jew (although, in the interest of fairness, the woman's ceaseless pleading and his own exhorted disciples persuade Jesus to "waste" some of his time and energy on availing her).

Jesus wasn't as bad as, say, Moses (Numbers 31:17-19 "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves"), or virtually any number of detestably vicious figures (including God) from the Old Testament and the Koran, but he is still, in spite of his sterling reputation among the faithful, a fairly wretched example of barbarism from a time that is thankfully well past us.

And yes, Jesus was a murderer. In Acts, he kills a man who refuses to give him his props by having worms devour his body. Particularly gruesome, I should think. In Luke 19:27, he tells his disciples to to bring before him any man who didn't believe in him and to slaughter the non-believer while Jesus watched (epic lulz, J.C. likes to watch). A very valid interpretation of Acts 5 is that Jesus Darth Vader'd the living fuck right out of the farmer and his wife who neglected to pony up God's share of dough they made from selling a piece of property.

But really, what the fuck do you want from a classless maniac who once razed a fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though he knew it wasn't even in season? Not much, I should hope.

A few statements which should be obvious on their face: first of all, this discussion may become tiresome at times, but it should never feel tired to any of us who have a personal stake in it. And I'm pretty sure we all do, without exception.

Secondly, this is a very brave movie from a very brave director (Larry Charles, who helmed and also co-wrote Bob Dylan's brilliant but misunderstood cult classic "Masked and Anonymous", as well as the hilarious, bawdy and genuinely provocative "Borat"), so I think it deserves at least a modicum of respect from those who disagree with its thesis. I saw Charles and Maher on CBC's The Hour, and Bill said something that resonated with me, as I suspect it did for a lot of atheists: that he needn't condescend to the religious by treating them with kid gloves, because they've certainly never bothered to extend that courtesy to those of us who have outgrown their fairy tales. They don't tend to murder or torture us quite like they used to do, but they sure do love to stigmatize us, even in the 21st Century.

Thirdly, I don't think it behooves anybody to speculate idly about Jeff Tweedy's thoughts or non-thoughts on the nature of religion or Maher's interrogation techniques. Whether he agrees with them principally or not is for him to comment on, and I think he's clearly not opposed to the movie's taboo-busting aspects if he's licensed a song for use in the flick.

(And personally, I would never wear an "atheists for Jesus" shirt. Have you ever read the New Testament? The guy was a murderer and a jerk, not to mention a bigot! To hell with him. Er, no pun intended, of course... )

I love that live version of High Water and Huck's Tune at the moment...

I'm really pleased that they chose that version of High Water. I only had to travel 10 minutes on the highway and 2 minutes in the city for that show, and it's the best Dylan gig I've ever seen. Fantastic fucking stuff!

And what about his vocals on Can't Wait. Holy FUCK. Can anybody think of a more convicted, sensuous Dylan vocal from this era? Or, for that matter, going back to the late '70s and early '80s? It's pretty amazing!

I haven't listened to any Dylan post-Blood On The Tracks. I have no desire to either.

This is literally the most tragic thing I have ever read in my 28 years of life.

i like huck's tune. what don't you like about it?

The vocals are rotten, it goes absolutely nowhere, and it suffers from the same disjointed, directionless quality that has plagued so much of Bob's latter-day material. "All the merry little elves can go hang themselves?" Wha...?!

The BS8 stream on NPR is mostly really excellent, though. The Oh Mercy and TOOM stuff are highlights (which isn't surprising), and Red River Shore is a full-on lost classic. Haunting words about a life half-lived in pursuit of lost love, a gorgeous melody and a kind of return to Durango sound that I can't help loving. Man...

The version of Someday Baby on here is also really excellent, to the point where I can't believe the shitty official version was even considered for the album, let alone selected over this one.

The lessons of this thread:

1) Having watched a five year-old 90-minute documentary film about a band that he used to be in, we all know Jay Bennett well enough to formulate legitimate opinions on the nature of his character, why he was booted from Wilco, and whether he deserved such treatment.

2) Jay Bennett, in spite of having written or co-written some of the best songs ever recorded by the band we come here to read about, elicits an almost Pavlovian response from many of his critics.

3) If Jay Bennett references his own career in an article, it's narcissistic; when Jeff Tweedy does it, it's probably really witty.

Annnnnd so on. Christ, people, cut the man a break. He's a good musician deserving of a wider audience, and there's no need to harp on him because of his perceived character defects.

(In all fairness, however, that MySpace picture at the head of this article is fucking ridiculous.)

Tons! Return to Me, Can't Get You Off of My Mind, Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache, Waitin' for You (from the Ya-Ya soundtrack), and a bunch more I can't think of at this hour. Ring of Fire from the Feeling Minnesota soundtrack, Blue Eyed Jane... a few others. Most of them are covers, but most of them are better than that awful Huck's Tune.

I think it's just wretched. Nothing but an hour of over the top schtick from a guy who is usually smart enough to reign himself in and walk a really fun tightrope over the line separating awesome from totally absurd/silly/gross/base/etc. To each his own, though.

Easily Scorsese's best film, and just as easily my favourite of all time. I can no more imagine somebody having seen this for the first time only recently than I can imagine myself having seen it fewer than 150 odd times, or not having any part of it committed to memory.

No other rock movie is even half this good (although Stop Making Sense is also fucking awesome).

Brighter Than Creation's Dark by the tiniest of noses, so I can't keep from giving respect to Evil Urges and Real Animal as well.

"Thanks, it'll go straight to DVD anyways!"

Ouch. He wasn't too far off the mark, judging from its poor showing at the box office this weekend. I still really want to see the movie, though. Gervais is funny enough that I'd watch him in nearly anything.

Then he must be right!

True enough. The McCain camp is to blame for much - if not all - of that perception, in fairness. Just like Sarah Palin is to blame for the general perception that she is a rural bumbler, an archaic and superstitious fool, a shrill "hockey mom," a fiscally incompetent and generally untrustworthy imbecile, and so forth. She is to be lauded, I suppose, for shoring up support in spite of this image from strange, ignorant people who do not find her very existence appalling beyond the pale. To the stupid, being Sarah Palin is better than being "elitist."

(Dictionary definition of elitism: e

Well, it's true. Science doesn't pull an idea out of thin air and say "DUH DIS BE'S WHAT IS REALS." Science formulates theories based on evidence and intuition, allowing for every possibility that a given postulation could be proven false. A scientist may strongly suspect that his theories are actual - which is to say he may believe it not on faith, but rather physical evidence - however no physicist worth his salt would die to protect an ultimately unprovable theory, nor would he live his life allowing for no other possibility than that he is correct. Religion just pulls stupid bullshit out of its ass and says, in spite of a powerful dearth of evidence, "DUH DIS BE'S WHAT IS REALS." It is childish and counterintuitive. All claims to the contrary are naive.

I don't get flustered during these debates because I feel I'm losing ground; clearly, I get flustered because believers become desperate and start scrambling upon the rocks of reason as they try in vain to continue a conversation that they will always find themselves on the losing end of.

P.S., I'm just back from the bar, I've had a few drinks, and I may not want to leave this murk now that I have allowed myself to sink back into it. Whoever is in charge of banning posters should keep a very close eye on me tonight.

P.P.S., The quoting thing still eludes me. Advance apologies about that.

P.P.P.S., I would rather play the Feud with Richard Dawson than go bowling with him.

So science can basically imagine a bunch of theories into existence and its logical but religions do the same and its foolish.

Science has a theory. Science can imagine something, but religion claims to know and believe what it proclaims. Religion offers truth claims. Sorry, you're being stupid. Try harder to understand the claims made by science and religion, please.

The "believers" in this thread have gotten exponentionally dumber since I exited it.

Yeah, yeah, that's just fucking great. I SAID JESUS CHRIST SO I MUST BE RELIGIOUS HA HA. If anything, that stands as an illustration of just how insidious this garbage truly is.

Jesus Christ. I've had it with this idiocy. Enjoy the thread, folks. Enjoy your Flying Spaghetti Monster, your Jesus, and your Flim-Flam Man. They are all bunkum.

That was angry and stupid.

beloved Atheist principals

What the fuck is this, first of all, before we attempt to proceed? We have been OVER this and OVER this and OVER this. Atheism is not a doctrine. How the fuck can a word that connotes nothing more than an absence of vague metaphysical belief a) possibly be as threatening as a codified system of beliefs and rituals that makes explicit demands of its followers, and become a central plank of any regime? Think about it. You can't abuse "atheism." You can, however, abuse religion by forcibly removing it from the picture, but if people weren't so fucking stupid as to put actual stock in it, then it wouldn't pose a threat to dipshits whose interest is strictly limited to gaining power, would it?

Do you have a problem with homophobia?

Of course I do. What are you nipping at now?

Can someone not believe in god and still be ok if other people do?

 

I think hate and murder would happen regardless of religion's existence. I also think all of the good things that cone from religion would happen even without religion.

Sure. It's your prerogative, really. If you are genuinely unbothered by the ostensible fact that ninety-something percent of the planet believes in something that is insane on its face, and you can live your life unresentful of the constant inculcation that fuels religion, by all means... do so. Hell, I wish I could! I can't, though, so I will continue to combat religious thought in every small way that I can

I just really don't get why people can't just believe whatever they want. It really blows my fucking mind.

And I can scarcely believe that some people are still able to issue such boldly naive statements. "Why can't I believe in the celestial teapot, dammit? :'( " Because it's baseless and more than a little stupid, that's why. The operative question is "why would somebody just believe whatever they want?" You're guilty of reframing this debate to fit some very convenient parameters, and that's just lazy. As has already been pointed out, you keep repeating yourself, and I keep answering your question.

This is what troubles me, many religious folks dismiss the downright evil aspects of the bible, attempt to write them off entirely, but then turn to the more agreeable parts as proof of, well, what? If we keep saying, no, that’s not true, that was never intended to be taken literally, nope, that part, that part is metaphor, no, that’s not really what god was intending to say, the bible/religion is not corrupt, man has corrupted it, etc – well, at the end of the day, what the hell are we left with? If it’s all metaphor, how can one also claim it is the word of a divine being? It’s either the word of god, or it’s entirely manmade. And if it is the word of god, why is it that god appears to have a totally archaic and misinformed understand of the nature of, well, pretty much everything? The house of cards that must be constructed and continually added to and kept aloft in order to keep this fa

Why should people have to justify their beliefs to people in general?

Because some beliefs are ridiculous on their face. It's just that simple (WILCO CONTENT YOU GUYS HOLY COW). As a society' date=' we have long held religion and spirituality above the argumentative fray, partly because religion professes to be unfalsifiable, and perhaps also because spirituality is something that is regarded by many as a "personal belief." In questioning it, we always run the risk of offending certain people's sensibilities. So respecting it out of hand is a great position to take, I suppose, if you prefer being nice to not being an idiot.

We're taught to respect people's beliefs about god, but if you think about how silly that is, you might just start to laugh (or cry). We aren't taught to respect people's beliefs about physics, or astronomy, or anything else that deals with the physical world, for that matter. If somebody stated with the utmost confidence that they believed a celestial teapot orbited the sun between Earth and Mars, and if they attempted to qualify this belief by adding that the teapot is too small to be detected by even our most powerful telescopes, you would correctly regard this person as a total goddamned nutbar. His belief is a stupid one, unsupported by evidence, and we are quite right to call a spade a spade.

If you encounter somebody who is convinced that saying a few Latin words over his breakfast cereal is literally going to turn it into the body of Julius Caesar or Elvis, it's a very safe bet that this person has lost his mind. But if he believes that a cracker becomes the body of Jesus at the mass, he's very likely perfectly sane; he just happen to be a Catholic. But the beliefs are equivalent, and they are equivalently crazy.

I don't know about you, but I am not going to be shamed by superstition into respecting patently ridiculous beliefs. I hope we can at least put [i']this[/i] question to bed now. Call me a fucking asshole, if it makes you feel better about my willingness to pick away at the festering scab that is religious thought. Really, it's okay with me. I'd rather my beliefs were insensitive than absurd.

It was more like, if you are going to quesiton where a creator came from, then why can't someone else question where everything came from?

Oh, they can question it all they like. I never said it was unwise to abstain from questioning anything, just that some questions are stupid and rooted in conclusions that aren't supported by evidence. There's an appreciable difference there, I should think.

I'm sure that most people, regardless of their religious affiliation (or lack thereof), have pondered the riddle of existence to varying degrees of intensity over the course of human history. What irks me is that people seem so eager to project their wildest notions onto the universe, as if wishing or "feeling" something is enough to make it so. It's fun to think about a higher power, sure; for a rational mind to actually make the jump to believing in one without any evidence whatsoever, though, is just ridiculous. To make that jump using fabricated or folkloric pseudo-evidence is unfathomable to me. Stump-dumb as it may be, however, crap like Christianity and Islam continues to thrive in the modern era.

Nobody here is necessarily trying to prove that God does exist. They are defending their beliefs against your attacks. You are the one on the attack in this situation.

Nobody is offering proof of god's existence because none exists. It's a real open-and-shut sort of affair, I'm afraid. What people seem to be arguing for is the viability of religious thought, which in reality is nothing more than a string of half-apologies (in the form of religious moderation, agnosticism, hippie-dippy pseudo-religion, etc.), vague metaphysics, and intellectual self-censorship. It's bullshit, it's stupid, and I don't have it in me to muster any respect for it whatsoever.

Look, the onus is always on the believers, simply because they are the ones professing belief in something that cannot be manifestly known, yet they claim is knowable. Something that is beyond the corporeal, but which often makes explicit truth claims that cross over into the physical world. These paradoxes are silly and absurd, and yet they must be reconciled if religious claims are to be taken seriously. The material world is known. It's real, it's proven, it's testable, it holds up under intense scrutiny. This god nonsense? It's just a jumbled mess of half-ideas and mostly crazy vagaries. A few people have admitted in the course of this discussion that their beliefs are illogical. That's great, because now I'm finished with them as far as this conversation is concerned. I can no longer take them seriously, because they have advertised, under no real duress whatsoever (because for fuck's sake, I'm ultimately not that awesome at being right or being a bully), that they are willing to believe absolutely anything. End of argument, really. Where the hell can you go from there?!

I just don't see how someone believe that a higher power created everything has any fucking bearing on your life or your belief that it came from nothing. If it comforts people and brings them some (you might argue empty) satisfaction to their life, what is it to you?

Because I'm a mean sonofabitch who gives more of a shit about what's real than what makes people happy. Good enough?

No, I'm just kidding. Er, kind of...

Banning stem cell research, outlawing abortion, increasingly deadly Jihadist activity, unrest in the Middle East, the displacement of and discrimination against indigenous peoples, forced conversion, ultimately just the general curtailment of human curiosity and scientific progress. These things concern me. They concern you, too. (And if they don't, Jesus fuck, what the shit is wrong with you?)

And you never responded to the Bjorn's assertion that a need to believe in a higher power might be hard wired into our brains. It makes sense

Yes, it makes perfect sense to you and Bjorn. Of course it does, because it allows you to point to atheists and regard them as "The Other" to an even more intense degree than you already do. "What's up with this sociopath, and why isn't the god part of his brain working?" It's a cute idea, but it doesn't wash with me, simply because at no time in my life have I ever believed in anything like a god.

For the record, though, I am perfectly willing to consider the idea that, yes, there is a "god part" of my brain, and it is defective, but it certainly seems like an incredible stretch to me. Given the mutual incompatibility of the world's religions, their obvious man-made origins, the lack of proof to support any of them... it's just not likely. However, given human curiosity, the persistence of "the big question" throughout human history, the startling number of people in the world who claim to have experienced euphoric revelations that have gone unexplained by medical science, perhaps there's something going on in some part of the brain that we've yet to explore. We live in a universe where even the basic quality of ninety-something percent of all matter is unknown to us, and the majority of our own planet's surface remains unexplored. Who knows what percentage of our potential we've realized? I'm willing to admit that the idea of an omnipotent god is something primordial that people are confusing with naive concepts informed by nothing more than their own limited understanding of the universe. Sure, why not? But right now, the idea of a walkin', talkin' god-man is just stupid.

Nothing about science can deny the very existence of god, so why can't you just let them coexist peacefully? Sure, science can disprove certain assertions in the human written bible, but nothing about science can prove or disprove the existence of god, so I don't see why they have to be treated as hostile.

1) Religion: ridiculous on its face. Doesn't make any sense at all, and 2) Guilt by association. If the justifications are bullshit, it stands to reason that so too is the belief. I treat religion with the same hostility that I reserve for the rantings of my neighbourhood derelict (the one that treats a spoon like a walkie-talkie and insists that the moon landing was a hoax). Again, we should not entertain nonsense simply because we are afraid of turning our backs on tradition or hurting people's feelings.

And you're argument might not fall on completely deaf ears if you weren't such a fucking condescending prick.

Yay! On that note, I'm going to sleep, where God makes me a viking. DISPROVE IT, MOTHERFUCKERS! THE ONUS IS TOTALLY ON YOU!

SO if a creator demands a creator, does not the other theory demand some form of creator?

No, because you're asking a question rooted in a false premise, and I suspect you're being disingenuous in asking it (although that might be giving you too much credit). The existence of a creator doesn't demand a creator per se; it merely demands some form of proof, like anything else. You have already arrived at a conclusion - that the universe demands a creator - and are insisting that skeptical inquiry honour it by providing either corroborating evidence or, I guess, blatant supposition. That's not what science does. Science gathers evidence, analyzes it, and only then arrives at a conclusion. Hypotheticals enter the picture all the time, obviously, but none that I can think of is quite so presumptuous or asinine as asking "Hey, do you think the universe definitely has a single creator, and that we can and must identify said creator now?" Absolutely nothing in the natural world tips in the direction of that hypothesis. It's been said that history's greatest scientists are the ones who ask the best, or most intuitive, questions. The question you're asking is not even an interesting one, to be perfectly blunt. You're just grasping at a syllogism, and it strikes me as pretty ridiculous. The only reason you're even asking the question in the first place is because this stupid notion of a "creator" has been banged into humanity's head like a steel fucking rail over the course of several millennia.

I don't say that atheists have to have an answer for the creation of the universe (and you're welcome to address me directly' date=' by the way). I do say that someone will have to satisfactorily explain the genesis of the universe and the (natural) provenance of all the matter and energy therein before I will renounce my belief in some higher power.[/quote']

 

And exactly where is the logic in that? I'm not being sarcastic, honestly. It's just that I can find none in your statements. You might just as well say "unless someone can explain why cancer is robbing so many good men and women of their lives, I will not renounce my belief in some higher power," or "until someone can explain the relative stability of our solar system, I will not renounce my belief in a higher power." These were scientifically unaddressable conundrums once, just like yours happens to be today, and they too are rooted in physics. They may not seem as daunting or unanswerable as your pet conundrum, but that's only because science has progressed, after many hundreds of years, to such a stage that it can now satisfactorily address the underlying problems that once prevented us from understanding the nature of these apparent conundrums.

 

You're feeding science a totally irrational challenge, drawing an outlandish correlation between the existence of the physical universe and an imagined "creator" of some sort. Classic argumentum ad consequentiam; you've got your conclusion, now you just need your corroborating evidence. Man, that must be a real handy way of looking at the universe! But I'm afraid you can approach your little challenge using nearly any variable - "until science proves X, where X represents a ponderable that cannot be satisfactorily addressed by science at this time, I refuse to renounce my belief in a higher power" - and you'd still be thrusting the cart way the fuck in front of the horse. The nuts and bolts of your challenge are immaterial; the nature of it is what matters, and it just doesn't wash, dude. I'm truly sorry about that.

 

Look at the things man has shrugged off and ascribed to "god's will" over the years, simply because we had exhausted our limited resources in search of answers to questions that had long proved elusive. And look at how much of it we can explain today, with the sum total of human knowledge informing our investigative process. All you're doing is asking the biggest question you can conceive of, caliber66, and holding it to science. I've said it before in this thread, but it clearly bears repeating: atheism is fundamentally unlike religion in every way, and it is not bound by your god delusion. It is not methadone for believers who suddenly realize they're standing on incredibly shaky intellectual ground. Once again, skeptical inquiry is proven humble, whereas spirituality is outed as being fueled by nothing more than fragile human ego. On a long enough timeline, I remain confident that science will be able to explain the origin of matter in the universe. And it irks me that you and I will both be long dead when it happens, cal, if that's really what it's going to take for you to start thinking for yourself.

 

I can safely say neither myself nor The Maker are the smartest people in this argument.

 

Yeah' date=' Beltmann posted a few times, didn't he? I've never met the guy, but he acquits himself beautifully over the internets. He is automatically the smartest guy in any VC thread, in my opinion.

 

Why should people have to justify their beliefs to people on the internets?

 

Why shouldn't they? People are people. When we step away from our computers, we're all just people off the internets.

It works both ways.

Not really, no. You might want to review my comment about how science is fueled by curiosity, not ego, and how rigorous the scientific process actually is. Religion is just pabulum, fit for babies. That's all she wrote.

ego

Exactly. It takes a tremendous ego to believe in any permutation of god. The humility necessary to simply observe and trust in the observable universe isn't something that everybody has at his or her disposal. "I don't know, and I'm okay with not knowing for the time being" isn't a statement that a lot of people are comfortable issuing.

So you're right! You make a very sound point.

If the universe demands a creator, then it follows that the creator demands a creator and so on and so on and so on and so on